New Line Snags Rights to Four-Woman Rock Opera "LIZZIE"

ST. LOUIS, Mo. - New Line Theatre, “the bad boy of musical theatre,” will present the driving, four-woman rock opera LIZZIE, by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, Tim Maner, and Alan Stevens Hewitt, in August 2017 to close the company’s 2016-2017 season. The production will be directed by New Line Associate Artistic Director Mike Dowdy.

LIZZIE began life in 1990 as a four-song experimental theatre/rock show hybrid, created by writer/director Tim Maner and songwriter Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer. Lizzie Borden: An American Musical sprang from Tim and Steven’s love of musicals, Americana, women rockers, and late-80s politics. In 2009, after a long development process, the show opened in New York, for a limited six-week run. In 2013, the show found its final form, and it was produced at Theater Under the Stars in Houston. In 2014, LIZZIE opened in Denmark. Since then there have been productions in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco.

New Line will present the regional premiere of the show.

LIZZIE's high-energy score is a raw, edgy, emotional blend of rock styles, finding inspiration from Pat Benatar, Heart, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, and Grace Slick, among others. The Village Voice described the show's “lush tunes which retch sex, rage, dyke heat, misanthropy, and incest … Surreal glee and gallows humor … Finally, a rock musical you’d wanna mosh to.” The New York Times called the show “a gothic rock ritual with a ‘riot girl’ attitude … an eerie hybrid of rock club and a turn-of-the-century New England parlor music. . . Presented with wall-rattling glee…deliciously watchable...”

The rest of New Line’s 2016-2017 season is not yet settled. New Line’s current season includes American Idiot in March; Atomic in June; and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tell Me on a Sunday in August.